Farewell @neillyneil

So he’s off. Neil Williams, head of digital at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills today swaps pinstripes for his dress-down trademark hoody and joins the growing team at GDS.

To be fair, he’s been there on and off for nearly a year (as his colleague remarked to me yesterday: ’emotionally, he’s been gone for ages’), but at least now he’s free to work full-time on devising a platform for government to communicate its corporate content better online. That’s a job every bit as big as the Citizen & Business product, but then he knows that.

The thing about Neil, and why he’s such a bonus for GDS, is that he doesn’t just do the sexy stuff. When Neil and team pushed to build a shared service platform to save £2.5m over 3 years, the process wasn’t exactly Agile. He’s managed a big team, in tough times, and still kept them creative, motivated and (largely) cheerful, from what I can see.

So good luck Neil. I look forward to your conversion to fully-fledged Shoreditch hipster. I suspect I’ll see you around 🙂

p.s. You can probably turn on idiotica.co.uk again now, right? Bernard Matthews can’t sue you again now.